No End of a Lesson - Unlearned

William R. Polk was a professor of history at the University of Chicago. During the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administrations, he was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Among his books are "Understanding Iraq, Violent Politics and Understanding Iran." He is vice chairman of the W.P. Carey Foundation.

America
appears once again to be on the brink of a war. This time the war
is likely to be in Syria and/or in Iraq. If we jump into one or both
of these wars, they will join, by my count since our independence,
about 200 significant military operations (not all of which were
legally "wars") as well as countless "proactive"
interventions, regime-change undertakings, covert action schemes and
search-and-destroy missions. In addition the United States has
provided weapons, training and funding for a variety of non-American
military and quasi-military forces throughout the world. Within
recent months we have added five new African countries. History
and contemporary events show that we Americans are a warring people.

So
we should ask: what have we learned about ourselves, our adversaries
and the process in which we have engaged?

The
short answer appears to be "very little."

As
both a historian and a former policy planner for the American
government, I will very briefly here (as I have mentioned in a
previous essay, I am in the final stages of a book to be called A
Warring People, on
these issues), illustrate what I mean by "very little."

I
begin with us, the American people. There is overwhelming historical
evidence that war is popular with us. Politicians from our earliest
days as a republic, indeed even before when we were British colonies,
could nearly always count on gaining popularity by demonstrating our
valor. Few successful politicians were pacifists.

Even
supposed pacifists found reasons to engage in the use of force. Take
the man most often cited as a peacemaker or at least a peaceseeker,
Woodrow Wilson. He promised to "keep us out of war," by
which he meant keeping us out of big, expensive European war. Before
becoming president, however, he approved the American conquest of
Cuba and the Philippines and described himself as an imperialist;
then, as president, he occupied Haiti, sent the Marines into the
Dominican Republic and ordered the Cavalry into Mexico. In 1918, he
also put American troops into Russia. Not only sending soldiers:
his administration carried out naval blockades, economic sanctions,
covert operations -- one of which, allegedly, involved an
assassination attempt on a foreign leader -- and furnished
large-scale arms supplies to insurgents in on-going wars.

The
purpose, and explanation, of our wars varied. I think most of
us would agree that our Revolution, the First World War and the
Second World War were completely justified. Probably Korea was also.
The United States had no choice on the Civil war or, perhaps, on
the War of 1812. Many, particularly those against the Native
Americans would today be classified as war crimes. It is the middle
range that seem to me to be the most important to understand. I see
them like this.

Some
military ventures were really misadventures in the sense that they
were based on misunderstandings or deliberate misinformation. I
think that most students of history would put the Spanish-American,
Vietnamese, Iraqi and a few other conflicts in this category. Our
government lied to us -- the Spaniards did not blow up the Maine; the
Gulf of Tonkin was not a dastardly attack on our innocent ships and
Iraq was not about to attack us with a nuclear weapon, which it did
not have.

But
we citizens listened uncritically. We did not demand the facts. It
is hard to avoid the charge that we were either complicit, lazy or
ignorant. We did not hold our government to account.

Several
war and other forms of intervention were for supposed local or
regional requirements of the Cold War. We knowingly told one another
that the "domino theory" was reality: so a hint of
Communist subversion or even criticism of us sent us racing off to
protect almost any form of political association that pretended to be
on our side. And we believed or feared that even countries that had
little or no connections with one another would topple at the touch
-- or even before their neighbors appeared to be in trouble.
Therefore, regardless of their domestic political style, monarchy,
dictatorship. democracy., it mattered not, they had to be protected.
Our protection often included threats of invasion, actual
intervention, paramilitary operations, subversion and/or bribery,
justified by our proclaimed intent to keep them free. Or at least
free from Soviet control. Included among them were Guatemala,
Nicaragua, Brazil, Chile, Italy, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, Iran,
Indonesia, Vietnam and various African countries.

Some
interventions were for acquisition of their resources or protection
of our economic assets. Guatemala, Chile, Iraq, Iran and Indonesia
come to mind.

Few,
if any, were to establish the basis of peace or even to bring about
ceasefires. Those tasks we usually left to the United Nations or
regional associations.

The
costs have been high. Just counting recent interventions, they have
cost us well over a hundred thousand casualties and some multiple of
that in wounded; they have cost "the others" -- both our
enemies and our friends -- large multiples of those numbers. The
monetary cost is perhaps beyond counting both to them and to us.
Figures range upward from $10 trillion.

The
rate of success of these aspects of our foreign policy, even in the
Nineteenth century, was low. Failure to accomplish the desired or
professed outcome is shown by the fact that within a few years of
the American intervention, the condition that had led to the
intervention recurred. The rate of failure has dramatically
increased in recent years. This is because we are operating in a
world that is increasingly politically sensitive. Today even poor,
weak, uneducated and corrupt nations become focused by the actions
of foreigners. Whereas before, a few members of the native elite
made the decisions, today we face "fronts." parties, tribes
and independent opinion leaders. So the "window of
opportunity" for foreign intervention, once at least
occasionally partly open, is now often shut.

First,
nationalism has been and remains the predominant way of political
thought of most of the world's people. Its power has long been
strong (even when we called it by other names) but it began to be
amplified and focused by Communism in the late Nineteenth century.
Today, nationalism in Africa, much of Asia and parts of Europe is
increasingly magnified by the rebirth of Islam in the salafiyah
movement.

Attempts
to crush these nationalist-ideological-religious-cultural movements
militarily have generally failed. Even when, or indeed especially
when, foreigners arrive on the scene, natives put aside their mutual
hostilities to unite against them. We saw this particularly vividly
and painfully in Somalia. The Russians saw it in Çeçnaya
and the Chinese, among the Uyghur peoples of Xinjiang (former
Chinese Turkistan).

Second,
outside intervention has usually weakened moderate or conservative
forces or tendencies within each movement. Those espousing the most
extreme positions are less likely to be suborned or defeated than
the moderates. Thus particularly in a protracted hostilities, are
more likely to take charge than their rivals. We have seen this
tendency in each of the guerrilla wars in which we got involved; for
the situation today, look at the insurgent movements in Syria and
Iraq. (For my analysis of the philosophy and strategy of the Muslim
extremists, see my essay "Sayyid Qutub's Fundamentalism and Abu
Bakr Naji's Jihadism"
on my website.)

What
is true of the movements is even more evident in the effects on civic
institutions and practices within an embattled society. In times of
acute national danger, the "center" does not hold.
Centrists get caught between the insurgents and the regimes.
Insurgents have to destroy their relationship to society and
government if they are to "win." Thus, in Vietnam for
example, doctors and teachers, who interfaced between government and
the general population were prime targets for the Vietminh in the
1950s.

And,
as the leaders of governments against whom the insurgents are
fighting become more desperate, they suppress those of their
perceived rivals or critics they can reach. By default, these
people are civilians who are active in the political parties, the
media and the judiciary . And, as their hold on power erodes and
"victory" becomes less likely, regimes also seek to create
for themselves safe havens by stealing money and sending it abroad.
Thus, the institutions of government are weakened and the range of
enemies widens. We have witnessed these two aspects of "corruption"
-- both political and economic -- in a number of countries. Recent
examples are Vietnam and Afghanistan.

In
Vietnam at least by 1962 the senior members of the regime had
essentially given up the fight. Even then they were preparing to
bolt the country. And the army commanders were focused on earning
money that they sold the bullets and guns we gave them to the
Vietminh. In Afghanistan, the regime's involvement in the drug
trade, its draining of the national treasury into foreign private
bank accounts (as even Mr. Karzai admitted) and in "pickpocketing"
hundreds of millions of dollars from aid projects is well documented. (See the monthly reports of
the American Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.)

Third,
our institutional memory of programs, events and trends is shallow.
I suggest that it usually is no longer than a decade. Thus, we
repeat policies even when the record clearly shows that they did not
work when previously tried. And we address each challenge as though
it is unprecedented. We forget the American folk saying that when
you find yourself in a hole, the best course of action is to stop
digging. it isn't only that our government (and the thousands of
"experts," tacticians and strategists it hires) do not
"remember" but also that they have at hand only one
convenient tool -- the shovel. What did we learn from Vietnam? Get
a bigger, sharper shovel.

Fourth,
despite or perhaps in part because of our immigrant origins, we are a
profoundly insular people. Few of us have much appreciation of
non-American cultures and even less fellow feeling for them. Within
a generation or so, few immigrants can even speak the language of
their grand parents. Many of us are ashamed of our ethnic origins.

Thus,
for example, at the end of the Second World War, despite many of us
being of German or Italian or Japanese cultural background, we were
markedly deficient in people who could help implement our policies in
those countries. We literally threw away the language and culture of
grandparents. A few years later, when I began to study Arabic,
there were said to be only five Americans not of Arab origin who knew
the language. Beyond language, grasp of the broader range of culture
petered off to near zero. Today, after the expenditure of
significant government subsidies to universities (in the National
Defense Education Act) to teach "strategic" languages, the
situation should be better. But, while we now know
much more, I doubt that we understand
other peoples much
better.

If
this is true of language, it is more true of more complex aspects of
cultural heritage. Take Somalia as an example. Somalia was not, as
the media put it, a "failed state"; it was and is a
"non-state." That is, the Somalis do not base their
effective identify as members of a nation state. Like
almost everyone in the world did before recent centuries, they
thought of themselves as members of clans, tribes, ethnic or
religious assemblies or territories. It is we, not they, who have
redefined political identity. We forget that the nation-state is a
concept that was born in Europe only a few centuries ago and became
accepted only late in the Nineteenth century in Germany and Italy.
For the Somalis, it is still an alien construct. So, not
surprisingly, our attempt to force them or entice them to shape up
and act within our definition of statehood has not worked. And
Somalia is not alone. And not only in Africa. Former Yugoslavia is
a prime example: to be 'balkanized' has entered our language. And,
if we peek under the flags of Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iraq, the Congo, Mali, the Sudan and other
nation-states we find powerful forces of separate ethnic
nationalisms.

The
effects of relations among many of the peoples of Asia and Africa and
some of the Latin Americans have created new political and social
configurations and imbalances within and among them. With European
and American help the governments with which we deal have acquired
more effective tools of repression. They can usually defeat the
challenges of traditional groups. But, not always. Where they do
not acquire legitimacy in the eyes of significant groups -- "nations"
-- states risk debilitating, long-term struggles. These struggles
are, in part, the result of the long years of imperial rule and
colonial settlement. Since Roman times, foreign rulers have sought
to cut expenses by governing through local proxies. Thus, the
British turned over to the Copts the unpopular task of colleting
Egyptian taxes and to the Assyrians the assignment of controlling
the Iraqi Sunnis. The echo of these years is what we observe in much
of the "Third World" today. Ethnic, religious and economic
jealousies abound and the wounds of imperialism and colonialism have
rarely completely healed. We may not be sensitive to them, but to
natives they may remain painful. Americans may be the "new boys
on the block," but these memories have often been transferred to
us.

Finally,
fifth, as the
preeminent nation-state America has a vast reach. There is
practically no area of the world in which we do not have one sort of
interest or another. We have over a thousand military bases in more
than a hundred countries; we trade, buy and sell, manufacture or give
away goods and money all over Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.
We train, equip and subsidize dozens of armies and even more
paramilitary or "Special" forces. This diversity is,
obviously, a source of strength and richness, but, less obviously, it
generates conflicts between what we wish to accomplish in one country
and what we think we need to accomplish in another. At the very
least, handling or balancing our diverse aims within acceptable means
and at a reasonable cost is a challenge.

It
is a challenge that we seem less and less able to meet.

Take
Iraq as an example. As a corollary of our hostility to Saddam
Husain, we essentially turned Iraq over to his enemies, the Iraqi
Shia Muslim. (I deal with this in my Understanding
Iraq, New York:
HarperCollins, 2005, 171 ff.) There was some justification for this
policy. The Shia community has long been Iraq's majority and because
they were Saddam's enemies, some "experts" naively thought
they would become our friends. But immediately two negative
aspects of our policy became evident: non-specialists: first, the
Shiis took vengeance on the Sunni Muslim community and so threw the
country into a vicious civil war. What we called pacification
amounted to ethnic cleansing. And, second, the Shia Iraqi leaders
(the marjiaah)
made common cause with coreligionist Iranians with whom we were
nearly at war all during the second Bush administration. Had war
with Iran eventuated, our troops in Iraq would have been more
hostages than occupiers. At several points, we had the opportunity to
form a more coherent, moral and safer policy. I don't see evidence
that our government or our occupation civil and military authorities
even grasped the problem; certainly they did not find ways to work
toward a solution. Whatever else may be said about it, our policy
was dysfunctional.

I
deserve to be challenged on this statement: I am measuring (with
perhaps now somewhat weakened hindsight) recent failures against what
we tried to do in the Policy Planning Council in the early 1960s.
If our objective is, as we identify it, to make the world at least
safe, even if not safe for democracy, we are much worse off today
than we were then. We policy planners surely then made many
significant mistakes (and were often not heeded), but I would argue
that we worked within a more coherent framework than our government
does today. Increasingly, it seems to me that we are in a mode of
leaping from one crisis to the next without having understood the
first or anticipating the second. I see no strategic concept; only
tactical jumps and jabs.

So
what to do?

At
the time of the writing of the American Constitution, one of our
Founding Fathers, Gouverneur
Morris, remarked that part of the task he and others of the authors
put it, was “to save the people from their most dangerous enemy,
themselves.”
Translated to our times, this is to guard against our being "gun
slingers." All the delegates were frightened by militarism and
sought to do the absolute minimum required to protect the country
from attack. They refused the government permission to engage in
armed actions against foreigners except in defense. I believe they
would have been horrified, if they could have conceived it, by the
national security state we have become. They certainly did not look
to the military to solve problems of policy. They would have agreed,
I feel sure, that very few of the problem we face in the world today
could be solved by military means So, even when we decide to
employ military means, we need to consider not only the immediate
but the long-term effects of our actions. We have, at least, the
experience and the intellectual tools to do so. So why have we not?

We
have been frequently misled by the success of our postwar policies
toward both Germany and Japan. We successfully helped those two
countries to embark upon a new era. And, during the employment of
the Truman Doctrine in Greece, the civil war there ended. There
were special reasons for all three being exceptions. Perhaps
consequent to those successes, when we decided to destroy the
regimes of Saddam Husain and Muammar Qaddafi, we gave little thought
of what would follow. We more or less just assumed that things would
get better. They did not. The societies imploded. Had we similarly
gone into Iran, the results would have been a moral, legal and
economic disaster. Now we know -- or should know -- that unless the
risk is justified, as our Constitution demands it be by an imminent
armed attack on the United States, we should not make proactive war
on foreign nations. We have sworn not to do so in the treaty by
which we joined the United Nations. In short, we need to be law
abiding, and we should look before we leap.

Our
ability to do any of these things will depend on several decisions.

The
first is to be
realistic: there is no switch we can flip to change our capacities.
To look for quick and easy solutions is part of the problem, not part
of the solution.

The
second is a matter
of will and the costs and penalties that attach to it. We would be
more careful in foreign adventures if we had to pay for them in both
blood and treasure as they occurred. That is, "in real time."
We now avoid this by borrowing money abroad and by inducing or
bribing vulnerable members of our society and foreigners to fight for
us.. All our young men and women should know that they will be
obliged to serve if we get into war, and we should not be able to
defer to future generations the costs of our ventures. We should
agree to pay for them through immediate taxes rather than foreign
loans.

The
third is to demand
accountability. Our government should be legally obligated to tell
us the truth. If it does not, the responsible officials should be
prosecuted in our courts and, if they violate our treaties or
international law, they should have to come before the World Court
of Justice. We now let them off scot-free. The only "culprits"
are those who carry out their orders.

Fourth,
in the longer term,
the only answer to the desire for better policy is better public
education. For a democracy to function, its citizens must be
engaged. They cannot be usefully engaged if they are not informed.
Yet few Americans know even our own laws on our role in world
affairs. Probably even fewer know the history of our actions abroad
-- that is, what we have done in the past with what results and at
what cost.

And
as a people we are woefully ignorant about other peoples and
countries. Polls indicate that few Americans even know the
locations of other nations. The saying that God created war to teach
Americans geography is sacrilegious. If this was God's purpose, He
failed. And beyond geography, concerning other people's politics,
cultures and traditions, there is a nearly blank page. Isn't it time
we picked up the attempt made by such men as Sumner Wells (with his
An Intelligent
American's Guide to the Peace and
his American Foreign
Policy Library),
Robert Hutchins, James Conant and others (with the General Education
programs in colleges and universities) and various other failed
efforts to make us a part of humanity?

On
the surface, at least, resurrecting these programs is just a matter
of (a small amount of) money. But results won't come overnight. Our
education system is stogy, our teachers are poorly trained and poorly
paid, and we, the consumers, are distracted by quicker, easier
gratifications than learning about world affairs. I had hoped that
we would learn from the "real schools" of Vietnam and
other failures, but we did not. The snippets of information which
pass over our heads each day do not and cannot make a coherent
pattern. Absent a matrix into which to place "news," it is
meaningless. I have suggested in a previous essay that we are in a
situation like a computer without a program. We get the noise, but
without a means to "read" it, it is just gibberish.

Our
biggest challenge therefore comes down to us: unless or until we
find a better system of teaching, of becoming aware that we need to
learn and a desire to acquire the tools of citizenship, we cannot
hope to move toward a safer, more enriching future.